Many workers believe they pay one part of their health insurance premium — say, $4,000 — and their employer pays the rest. But that’s not how it works. When your employer “contributes” the other $9,770 toward your premium, the money doesn’t come out of company profits. It comes out of your wages.

The Congressional Budget Office explains: “When an employer offers to pay for health insurance, it pays less in wages and other forms of compensation than it otherwise would, keeping total compensation about the same.” MIT health economist and Obama advisor Jonathan Gruber writes in the Handbook of Health Economics that economic research yields “a fairly uniform result: the costs of health insurance are fully shifted to wages.” In a recent survey, more health economists agreed on this issue — 91 percent — than on any other question posed.

In other words, you pay the full cost of your health benefits: partly through an explicit $4,000 premium and partly because your wages are $9,770 lower than they otherwise would be.

Gary Claxton, the Kaiser vice president who directs the survey, defends their interpretation. Economists agree that workers bear these costs in the long run, he says, but not necessarily in the short run — and the “employee share” of premiums reached a new high in 2010, while the nominal “employer contribution” remained constant. “I think the way we talk about it is the way most people think about it and experience it,” he says.

Short-run exceptions to the rule are possible under certain conditions. But Kaiser doesn’t bother trying to establish whether capital and labor markets are correcting a combination of below-equilibrium profits and above-equilibrium labor costs. Year after year, Kaiser reports that employers bear the lion’s share of the cost of health benefits, and any increase in the “employee share” is a cost-shift.

Kaiser even claims that employers shift “the costs of health insurance to workers through [higher] deductibles and other cost-sharing.” But increasing deductibles and coinsurance does not shift health insurance costs; it reduces the amount of insurance. That shifts the cost of health care — from all members of the insurance pool to individual members, not from employers to workers.

Kaiser’s embrace of this myth clouds how it interprets changes in health benefits. Kaiser president Drew Altman warns that “shifting the costs to workers during a terrible economy is bad news for working people…it means added economic insecurity.”